Online Casino

Online casinos are the virtual version of their physical counterparts and therefore there is little difference between the two, save for the fact that the gaming is conducted within the comfort of your own home. In the interests of securing a decent profit margin and remaining competitive, online casinos offer odds and payouts which are totally comparable to their physical counterparts and some online casinos are now implementing the landmark decision of actually publicising the odd rates (chances of winning that a better will have for each of the games). As is to be expected however, the house always maintains the ultimate edge!
The transition from physical medium to the virtual world has not proven an easy one and this is due to the fact that there has been a great deal of scepticism and suspicion hovering over the owners of these online casinos. In particular, concerns have been raised about the security of the games, and the financial details of the players, as well as the fairness of the games, i.e. that the “house” may cheat by unduly manipulating the odds in their favour. In an attempt to quell such concerns, many online casinos have sought to rely upon firmly established number generator software which has been coded and sold by 3rd party retailers.
For those of us who are interested in the history of online casinos, their birth can be directly traced back to the country of Antigua and Barbuda when in 1994, in an attempt to revitalise its sagging economy and attract the extremely lucrative tourist dollar, the law was changed in order to permit gambling. Specifically, the legal administration altered the law in order to create a license requirement for prospective casino owners of all descriptions (and especially online casinos) with the specific requirement that they had to acquire and hold one of these licenses.

Despite the fact that this all took place some 16 years ago, the overwhelming majority of online casino operators actually have their license from Antigua and Barbuda and operate their base of operations from the country.

However, there were a few people who were absolutely determined to stifle the growth and expansion of online casinos, condemning them as an affront to decency, and the scourge of morality. One of the most vehement of those naysayers was a little known Senator from the US State of Arizona by the name of Jon Kyr who tried numerous times to have a law passed that would allow for a blanket prohibition on all forms of gambling. Kyr found his moral crusade failed to interest the general population and he was forced in a series of humiliating defeats to revise his proposals with little effect. Despite his most gallant efforts, his pleas fell on deaf ears.

However, it was the anti-gambling movement that had the last laugh when in 2006 a Bill was passed (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) which made it a criminal offence for any American financial institution to process any payments from gambling entities. With no legitimate or effective means of processing the payments from the online casinos this saw the collapse of the online gambling casino industry in America. The rationale for such a dramatic piece of legislation was for the protection of morals and public safety, with one of the most leading arguments often cited being that the 2006 Act was designed to protect against gambling addictions.

However, the reality of the matter is much less altruistic: the federal government was concerned that gamblers would attempt to funnel their tax free profits into accounts outwith the United States where the government would not be able to tax on them.

If you feel that this is unfounded criticism, read the act for yourself. Land based casinos, state lotteries and racing tracks (all of which are easily taxed) are all unaffected by the Act, which seems to run contrary to the supposed concerns of gambling addiction.

There was a series of counter campaigns to bring about either the abolishment of the Act or at the very least, eliminate its most draconian policies and effects. Regrettably, there was little success and this was primarily due to the woefully low number of advocates who were prepared to defend the industry as a whole, whilst there was a select few who were prepared to argue in favour for online poker, other casino games were swept to the side and then forgotten about.

Like any other knee jerk reaction, the effects of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act quickly proved to be of a nature that the federal government did not want, much to their chagrin. It is estimated that the US government has lost out in approximately $5.5 billion annually which they could have collected had the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act not been passed.

If the Government thought that by passing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act they would be able to stop gambling taking place, they were woefully mistaken and so Americans are now simply taking their betting to online casinos which have been licensed and regulated in different jurisdictions where the embargo is ineffectual. The initial concerns raised by the government have now ironically came true and so in their priggish attempt to quell the monster they gave birth to it.

There has been whisperings in the Congress of the possibility of change, and many are pinning their hopes that the Obama administration will be bold enough to repeal the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of the former administration. The campaign to repeal/reform the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is steadily increasing in influence and power and there are many Senators who are now placing their support behind the policy.

One man in particular stands out from the crowd: Congressman Barney Frank who proposed new legislation that would be much more accommodating and supportive of online gambling only last year. His proposed Bill, the Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act has been widely praised by numerous bodies as a coherent, just and competent piece of legislation that strikes a fair balance between the interests of the US economy, the rights of the US citizens and the obligations of the online casino proprietors themselves.

Another Congressman who is making headlines for all the right reasons has been Robert Wexler who proposed for consideration his own Bill, the Skill Game Protection Act which was also proposed in 2009. The implications of the Skill Game Protection Act are very dramatic indeed, and if passed would in effect grant a variety of skill based games which involve players competiting against one another total immunity from legislation. Whether such far reaching laws will be effectively passed remains to be seen, but it would seem that the future of the online gambling industry in America is now looking fairly optimistic.

There can be no denying the tremendously positive impact that the reintroduction of online gambling in America would have on the economy as a whole, for a study commissioned by PricewaterHouse Coopers identified that if this was to be permitted, the federal government could generate an additional $40 billion over the next decade. Given the dire state of the economy as a whole, this would go a significant way towards helping to stem the deficit in the national budget.

The term online casino also poses problems in terms of providing clear definition, because it is a rather generic term which encompasses a multitude of different entities. Broadly speaking, online casinos as they exist can be divided into two main categories which are:
-Download only casinos
-Web based casinos

Web based casinos are websites which provide a variety of gambling outlets and games which can be accessed and used by the player without actually having to download any of the games onto their computer. However, given that the more sophisticated online casinos are multimedia based this then means that the gamer must rely upon a variety of different plug-ins and downloads in order to effectively view a lot of the material contained within the site.

In the interests of expediting this fairly laborious process, many online casinos are handily provide download links for these plugins thereby speeding up the process significantly. There are some online casinos which are based solely on HTML, meaning that the requirement for these plugins is effectively eliminated, however these are dying out at an exponential rate. This is because the quality of detail that they can comfortably provide is limited at best as more and more players are looking for flashy based websites.

One downside associated with the web based casinos is that the gamer will eat into their bandwidth to access them because they will be required to stream all of the multimedia onto their computer. For those gamers who broadband this does not pose quite as big an issue, because the generous download rates provided by broadband providers enables them to access this information in the blink of an eye. However, if you have a limited bandwidth (whether as a result of using the increasingly obsolete dial up or due to a tariff broadband policy) then you may find that you “spend” your bandwidth limit quicker than you wanted as a result.

Download only online casinos are slightly different from their web based counterparts in that they specifically require the software client which has been used to create the website to be downloaded directly onto the machine of the user. The crucial difference with download only casinos is that once they have been downloaded onto the machine of the player, all content of the casino (including the multimedia: graphics sound et al) is handled on the server side. This means that the gamer will NOT have to expend copious amounts of their bandwidth simply to access the material as is.

However, there have been concerns raised about download only casinos because they require foreign code to be downloaded onto the machine of the user, primarily due to privacy and security concerns.

Spyware and viruses, which include the likes of keyloggers (malicious programs that will record all of the key strokes submitted by the user and then report this information to a central system) can be inserted into such content whether intentionally or negligently. Indeed, there have been cases of unscrupulous online casino operators stealing the personal details of their gamers in precisely this manner. Whilst this is by no means true of every online casino, it is a risk of sufficient severity that it is worthy of mention.
One key way in which online casinos differ from their physical counterparts is the inclusion of a signup bonus for new members. Once the exclusive domain of a select few casinos who were trying to establish a competitive edge over their peers, it has now became an industry standard and as such, its impact has been somewhat diluted.

These signup bonuses typically take the form of money being deposited into the personal account of the player upon signing up, although there is invariably a number of conditions and rules imposed upon the bonus which has the effect of severely restricting how it can be used and accessed.

Typically, the bonus will only become active after the member has actually deposited and gambled a fixed amount of their own money, and even then they may not be able to withdraw the bonus from their account, instead it must be used solely for betting in the casino. This is designed to prevent people from joining an online casino purely to acquire the bonus and then from there, subsequently quit their membership.
There has been a great deal of criticism aimed at the online casino industry over the issue of gambling addiction, and many feel that the online casinos place gamblers at a higher level of risk of developing addiction. This has been attributed to a number of different factors:

1. By virtue of money being processed in the virtual world and through electronic payment methods, this means that the gambler is emotionally detached from the amount of money they are wagering.

2. The comfort of the home along with the ability to visit an online casino at any time means that longer periods of time can and will be spent gambling.

3. Removed from friends and family as well as their supervision, this means that a gambler does not have as many checks and balances on their spending.

4. The online casino is something of a fantasy world, providing a dose of escapism from the grind of daily life which may end up providing a negative emotional crutch for people.

However, it is not entirely fair to simply demonise online casinos as the epitome of evil, institutions which will destroy families and suck people dry for every last dollar in their account. If we consider the issue from a purely mathematical (and in particular, statistical one) the proportionately higher number of online casinos compared to land based casinos means that they will attract higher numbers of gamblers and visitors.

Let’s use an example.

If every land based casino attracts 10,000 gamblers every year, and there are 10,000 casinos, then there are 100,000 gamblers per year. Let us assume for the purposes of this hypothetical calculation that the addiction rate is 5%, meaning that using those figures as they are presented to us, 5,000 gamblers would become addicts per year.

If every online casino attracts 50,000 gamblers per year and there are 10,000 online casinos, then there are 500,000 online gamblers per year. Again, using the 5% addiction rate this would mean that the number of online gambling addicts would be 25,000 online gambling addicts per year.

On a superficial level, if we were presented only with the two end results, i.e. 5,000 and 25,000 addicts respectively the chances are that the first assumption would be that online gambling is more dangerous. However, if we examine the issue in more depth we can plainly see that the degree of risk remains the same and the only fair explanation for the discrepancy is that the online casino industry has a bigger share of the market.

If you are concerned about the risk of becoming an addict, there are a number of steps you can implement to help protect against this issue. Before you visit any online casino, make sure you firmly establish a clearly defined time slot as well as bankroll. Once you reach the limit of either the two, then you stop.

Make sure that you have set aside enough money for the day, for food and other sundry items before you wager ANY of your money in the online casinos.

If you find yourself on a losing streak, do not under any circumstances attempt to chase it with more bets because all you are doing is throwing good money after bad and this is a sure fire recipe for disaster. On this note, make sure that you do not rely on credit cards to provide yourself with more cash to help finance a gambling spree.